Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Butterworth B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2527348 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Sep
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children.
Butterworth Brian B Reeve Robert R Reynolds Fiona F Lloyd Delyth D
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080829 35
Are thoughts impossible without the words to express them? It has been claimed that this is the case for thoughts about numbers: Children cannot have the concept of exact numbers until they know the words for them, and adults in cultures whose languages lack a counting vocabulary similarly cannot possess these concepts. Here, using classical methods of developmental psychology, we show that children who are monolingual speakers of two Australian languages with very restricted number vocabularies ...[more]
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